Officially Minnesotan - with "i" dotted, and "t" crossed

My years of flagrant disregard for Minnesota state vehicle laws has come to an end. Today I purchased my official Minnesota License Plates, and they nicely match my offical Minnesota Driver's License I got back in December. Huzzah! I can now be pulled over without fear of accruing additional fines for driving a car with South Dakota plates despite having been a resident of Minnesota for the last decade or so.

Tangential Thinking

I watched the 26th, and likely final, episode of Claymore today. It was good, and the entire series was highly enjoyable. It did get me thinking about the inherent problem with watching anime based on an ongoing manga series: it is really hard to provide resolution when they story the anime is being adapted from isn’t complete yet. Assuming Wikipedia can be believed the anime’s plot stayed pretty true to the manga through episode 20 before diverging, presumably to set up an actual ending. The ending we got is by no means bad; it just leaves a lot of unanswered questions. So here’s hoping Claymore was popular enough to warrant a second season. Also I really should look into getting the manga.

I spent some time thinking about the various options the creators of anime adapted from an ongoing manga series can take. There is the Claymore/Fruits Basket option: stay basically true to the manga until the final few episodes and then try to set up a satisfactory ending. Fruits Basket’s ending worked for me, I’m still mulling over Claymore’s (but it didn’t make me want to throw anything so that’s a good sign). This is a pretty standard choice for when there is more manga than anime. There are also varying degrees of divergence: Fruits Basket doesn’t diverge all that much from the manga, and no major plot points are resolved in the anime’s ending (at least none that also exist in the manga). Whereas X comes to a complete and unequivocal ending (something the X/1999 manga hasn’t and may never do) which means at a certain point its creators just started making stuff up. InuYasha, on the other hand, just plain stopped with a little bit of voice over detailing the character’s desire to keep on hunting Naraku (they did have the decency to finish up the story arc they were on).

At the other end of the spectrum you can have more anime than manga. This happens mostly with long running anime. Bleach and Naruto are two popular examples of anime that caught up to their manga. In both their cases the anime continued with episodes not based on the manga, until enough additional chapters of the manga had been published to make returning to anime adapted from it a viable option. Interestingly the Hunter × Hunter anime just stopped when it ran out of manga, only to return with OVAs as more manga was published.

These ponderings lead me to consider Real Bout High School; partially because it represents a manga that has next to nothing to do with the anime “based” on it (much like how the movie The Lawnmower Man has nothing to do with the Stephen King short story of the same name). The manga (I’ve read five of the six volumes) is alright, nothing earth-shatteringly good or bad about it. The anime that was “adapted” from it, however, is really bad (or at least the first 4 episodes were - I couldn’t make myself continue on after that). The quality of the manga, or the anime's lack-there-of isn’t what really captured my fancy today, instead I mostly reflected on how I came to purchase it (the manga, thankfully the anime was a rental), mainly because I'm fairly sure Real Bout High School is the first manga I ever bought(I know it is certainly the first I ever purchased in a store and not online).

A few years back my company moved their corporate headquarters to a new building (from Plymouth, MN to a building that has a Minneapolis address even if it is still technically in a suburb). They, as businesses are wont to do, had an open house to celebrate the event (actually they had several, but one I’m concerned with was for employees and their families). My corporate office opted to hold a raffle for anyone from my little satellite office who was interested in attending, the prize for which was them covering the cost of the hotel room. Other people from our office were of course free to come, they just had to pay for their own hotel rooms. I was one of the winners. Obviously this has nothing to do with manga, but the day after I, and several of my coworkers, found ourselves in the Twin Cities with some time to spare. So we went to a mall, either the Ridgedale Shopping Center in Minnetonka or the Southdale Shopping Center in Edina not that it really matters. I eventually ending up in a store with actual anime for sale (I picked up Vampire Hunter D for sure, and maybe Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust as well). Then I noticed the manga, and I thought, "why not take the plunge?" I first looked at Oh My Goddess!, but decided against it because I couldn’t find the first volume. I kept picking up Love Hina, but in the end I grabbed the first two volumes of Real Bout High School. Not because I’d heard anything about it, but solely because the Love Hina covers were a bit heavy on the eye candy, and I was too embarrassed to be seen by my coworkers reading them on the drive home. A silly reaction to be sure, and one that didn’t persist; within a few months I had no problem bringing Love Hina manga to work with me.

Alright, enough of my meandering train of thought. W00t for post 60! And to celebrate I leave you with a host of amusing videos (host being defined here as four). To start things off, one my friend Todd just today sent me in an e-mail with the subject: WATCH THIS NOW! (his emphasis).


And now I venture into the realm of the Penny Arcade Alliance forums and to the land of the <Burley Men> who took time out from their usual activities to point these three videos out:

"You even grill geeky" - Matt

This last Saturday I gathered with my gaming buddies for more role playing geekery. We added a bit to the usual mix this time around. Paul acquired a portable grill. In his e-mail informing us of the purchase he mentioned it had about the same grilling area as a hibachi, which I mistakenly took to mean he’d be bringing something similar to an actual hibachi. In retrospect I should have known better.

While I was expecting something like this:
Instead we ended up with the Grilliput (this is picture is taken from ThinkGeek and sadly isn't an actual action shot of us using the grill):
The Grilliput consists of two parts. The actual grill (assembled on the left, and in its storage mode on the right):And the optional fire bowl (fully open on the left, and again in storage mode on the right):
We cooked hamburgers, brats, and corn on the cob. It was all very delicious.

With food out of the way we settled down for a rousing game of Super Munchkin.
We also couldn't pass up the opportunity to play some four person Mario Strikers Charged. As a general note, I really ought to get a Wii.

Amazingly after all that we still found time to actually role play. Matt wrapped up the Shadowrun portion of his BESM campaign. I found it pretty amusing how quickly our dimension hopping characters started thinking like stereotypical shadowrunners. We may be on a mission to save the universe, but when we found ourselves in need of money we pretty quickly hatched a plan to rob a few of Seattle's local mafiosi to obtain it (we had some fun with Jedi mind tricks).

Matt ended the session by depositing us in a classic D&D style world where we quickly got to save a halfling cleric from some owlbears. I'm not sure how many campaigns out there have featured vans trying to run down owlbears, however I cannot help but notice I've taken part in a few campaigns now where vehicles have been used as weapons.

All-in-all, a very fun weekend.

This one is for all the geeks in the house

So while browsing the "My WTF video of the day" thread on the Penny Arcade Alliance forums I came across this beauty. Enjoy.



To the best of my knowledge I have five people who read this blog with any regularity (hi guys). So for the two people in my known audience who aren’t big anime fans the soundtrack the above hacked ROM is set to is the ending theme to the thoroughly delightful anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Two Topics. Unrelated, but of Equal Importance.

If you like webcomics, but still value your free time then Tangents is a dangerous website. I have found out about far, far too many interesting comics there. Most recently it pointed me in the direction of No Rest For The Wicked. All I can say is if you aren't looking for another webcomic to read then stay away, because it is damn good.

I almost let the day go by without mentioning it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day! So allow me to go out with a nice choice quote from Treasure Island, "There! That's what I think of ye. Before an hour's out, I'll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour's out, ye'll laugh upon the other side. Them that die'll be the lucky ones."

Because I’ve apparently mistaken my blog for Twitter

As I sit here and admire my (and my coworkers’) handiwork I have to reflect that nothing says “competent professional” quite like a computer held together with packing tape (and just to be safe a fair amount of black electrical tape). If I ever figure out how to move pictures from my cell phone to a computer I’ll be sure to show you. . .

Playground Fun Now Coming to an Office Near You

I had planned on posting about something today. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to talk about but it was probably going to be either WoW (because both Chipple and Cominius are over 40 and I have pictures of them on their mounts), or BESM (because we gamed again on Labor Day). Instead you are getting a rare post about work.

This morning I took a call that has to rank in my top ten most ridiculous calls I’ve ever handled. I’ve mentioned before (last September in fact) that one of the things my company does is provide an after hours repair service for various telephone and cable companies. In general these companies are all pretty small (as compared to a Qwest or AT&T) and generally have a pretty limited number of exchanges that they serve. Now with the advent of local number portability things aren’t completely as cut and dry as all that, but for the most part if a caller’s exchange isn’t on the list provided to me by the phone company s/he is trying to call it is a pretty safe bet s/he is calling the wrong phone company.

So this morning I got a call from John Customer calling Fake Name Telephone Company (henceforth I’ll be calling it FNT). He told me he had no dial tone, and gave me the phone number and as soon as I heard it I knew two things, the city and state he was calling from (and FNT does indeed have customers there), and that he probably didn’t get telephone service from FNT (because his exchange was XYY instead of XYZ). Still with number portability it is possible he was a FNT customer (he would be the first one I’ve ever had for that company in that city with that exchange, but that doesn’t guarantee he was wrong), so I asked the all important “cover-my-company’s-butt” question, “and you get this phone service through FNT?” He answered yes, so I moved on. After gathering up all the relevant information and ending the call, I called up the on call technician for FNT and told him what I had. The tech responded with, “Yeah, he’s not our customer, but give me the information and I’ll check it out to be sure.”

About 30 minutes later I get second call from John Customer. He told me that he’d reported no dial tone a little bit earlier, and a tech had called him back, but the tech told him he wasn’t a customer of FNT, and John Customer knows he is a customer of FNT. That’s right John Customer didn’t believe the tech, and despite not being found by the tech on the FNT customer rolls, he knows he’s a customer. I did a quick run down in my head of my options at this point. I could try and convince the caller that no he probably isn’t a customer of FNT, I could call the tech back as say guess what that caller is back and he says he is too a customer of FNT, or I could try and slam by head through my computer’s monitor. I opted to call the tech back. I offer up the fact a reached his answering machine as proof of a benevolent God.

I, of course, made it sound as professional as I could, but the message I left on the tech’s machine still boiled down to, “am too!” John Customer called back a third time, no doubt to say, “am too plus infinity*,” but blessedly he was interrupted by the tech calling him back. Either the tech had discovered he was in fact wrong, or he was able to convince John Customer that he really wasn’t a customer of FNT, but in any event that ended the whole ridiculous exchange.

I cannot resist making this analogy, even though there is only one known reader of this blog who will fully understand and appreciate it, so Dan this is for you. This call was like Staghmar and Carthris having one of their “No U!” fights, but with private messages instead of in /gchat and naturally one of them would have to use me as an intermediary. So basically it would start with Stag sending Chipple a PM saying tell Carthris, “NO U!” I would send Carthris a PM saying, “Stag says no u.” Carthris would reply to Stag with a hardy, “NO U!” Staghmar would come back to Chipple. . . I think you get the picture. And sadly in the exchange this morning there was no Zilpah around to fop or /gkick the involved parties.

*He might also have been calling back to say, “am too, I’m rubber and you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off of me, and sticks to you!” In actuality he was probably calling back to say, “Hey the tech hasn’t called me back, and I want my phone fixed!” However I think my first two guesses are much more fun.

I leave you with this completely unrelated video that shows German women can be a little weird (but really I don't think weirdness knows either gender or international boundaries). There is nothing inherent to this video identifying the performers as German, but for further information about Lynne & Tessa try here, or here.

Goodbye, So Long, Farewell, Long Live the New Edition

My first impression of using BESM 3e was quite positive, and I’ve been thinking about the differences between the new BESM and the previous edition. I’ve mentioned, briefly, the basics of the BESM 2nd Edition mechanics before. The characters are defined numerically by three stats: body, mind, and soul (quantifying the physical, mental, and metaphysical/supernatural). The success of non-combat actions are determined by rolling two six-sided dice (or as those of us in the hobby would say 2d6) and comparing the number to the relevant stat (body for physical actions, mind for mental actions, and soul for basically everything else), if the result is equal or less then the stat the action succeeded. Various skills and abilities can be taken to make success more likely (for both combat and non-combat actions), but those are the basics.

Combat itself is slightly more complicated, but only slightly. If one of the PCs in my campaign were to try and put the hurt on a hapless NPC it would have gone something like this. First the player would have tried to hit NPC (probably with a sword, they all seemed to like their swords); the player would roll 2d6 hoping to get a result equal to or under his attack combat value (which starts out as the average of all three stats). If the result was over the combat value the attack was a miss and we moved on, but if the player succeeded then I’d make a defense roll for said hapless NPC. I’d roll 2d6 and hope to get under the NPC’s defense combat value (which starts out as the average of the NPC’s three stats minus two). If the defense roll succeeds then the NPC managed to block, dodge, parry, soak, or otherwise some how avoid what would have been a successful attack. Should the roll fail the player would gleefully announce how much damage his attack just dealt.

Different variations on the “roll this number or less” mechanic have been with role playing games since the very beginning of the hobby. It is certainly a serviceable mechanic and I’ve played many fine game systems that make use of it (GURPS and the Hero System come to mind, but they hardly scratch the surface). It can have some drawbacks however. Depending on exactly how it gets implemented it can be counterintuitive – for example in BESM 2nd Edition bonuses are expressed as negative numbers, while positive numbers are penalties. It can also start to break down when a character has enough skill, bonuses, or other modifiers to raise the target number above whatever the highest possible number you can roll on the dice the game is using making it basically impossible to fail. In BESM 2e, which uses 2d6, that number is 12 (while in GURPS and Hero that number is 18 because both systems use 3d6). This point can be reached pretty quickly and easily in BESM 2e even by starting characters.

With BESM 2e in particular another problem that could arise during combat is the characters that go first in a combat round tend to do nothing but burn through the opponents defenses allowing the slower acting characters to actually damage them. First off combat rounds - almost every role playing game divides combat time into discrete units generally called rounds, turns, or phases which usually represent a few seconds of time (I’ve seen systems where a round was as fast as one second, and others where it was as long as one minute). Now as for burning through defenses – the simple combat example I gave above covers one person making one attack, but there are various abilities that allow for multiple attacks during a round (alternatively more then one person can attack the same target in a round). BESM handles this by making the target’s defense combat value decrease by two for each use after the first in the round. If the target also has multiple actions during a round the penalties start once all of those actions are used up. I tended to throw one powerful opponent backed up by some cannon fodder at my players so I tried to design them to be able to fight multiple opponents. Since for most of my campaign the PCs had two actions a round, their opposition usually had three.

All of the above added up to make most fights look something like this (in a very simplified sense): the first PC would attack twice (almost certainly succeeding both times), the villain would defend twice (again almost certainly succeeding both times), the second PC would attack twice, the villain would successfully defend the first attack and have about a 50% chance of succeeding at the second attack, the third PC would attack twice, the villain would try to defend but at this point had only a minute chance of succeeding, and this was repeated until the villain was defeated. Fortunately creative players can go a long way to alleviating this problem, and my players were nothing if not creative. Seriously how many players would think to have their characters use Ethernet cable to first lasso an attacking dragon, and then use it as reigns to ride said dragon while fighting other dragons? And the great thing about BESM 2e is it is flexible enough that when aforementioned player announced his plans regarding Ethernet cable and attacking dragon, or any of the other countless wild/crazy stunts they all pulled I didn’t need to grab the rule book and start madly flipping pages to try and find a relevant rule, I just had them roll their attack and applied whatever seemed relevant as a modifier and adjudicated the results.

So how does BESM 3e differ? Well it does away with the “roll under” mechanic in favor of roll 2d6, add your relevant skills and other modifiers (or subtract relevant penalties), and total your result - if it is equal to or higher then a target number set by the GM you succeed. These types of systems tend to be a bit more intuitive for people to grasp, although the need to judge what an appropriate target number is can be annoying for the GM. As for combat both sides roll 2d6 and add their combat values (plus other relevant modifiers) and the higher total succeeds (ties go to the attacker iirc). Character creation is more complicated then it was under 2e. Characters in BESM 2e where built on fairly small point totals as compared to most point based role playing games. I favored 25-35 points for starting characters, whereas GURPS 3rd edition suggested 100 points for most of their starting characters (really 145 points since it was 100 points + 40 points in disadvantages + 5 points in quirks), while HERO 5th edition suggests 150 points for their starting characters (at the heroic level for super heroes it suggests 350 points). Granted each of these games uses a completely different system so you cannot really just compare point totals, but in general the more points you have to create a character the more complex your options are going to be and the more powerful (or diverse) your character is going to be. The characters we created for Matt's campaign were built on 300 points and I'd estimate are about on par with a 2e character of 30 or 35 points. So obviously the costs of the various abilities in BESM have been completely reworked for 3e, and the number of options available to you has increased significantly. This certainly doesn't hurt BESM, character creation was extremely flexible under 2e, and it only becomes more so under 3e. While I have to reiterate that character creation has become more complex, I'd still say it is far easier than say Hero 5th edition or Shadowrun 4th edition.

Anyway to sum up, my first taste of BESM 3e was positive and I look forward to playing some more. I believe we are getting together again on Labor Day for round two of the Mattoverse, so I'll probably have some more to say about it after that.

Before I go I'd like to point out I've been blogging for one year. Woohoo! I'm a little surprised I've kept it up, all previous attempts at anything resembling a journal have failed quite miserably. By my count I've been blogging for 381 days and with this being post 54 I'm averaging just over one post every seven days; which is pretty much exactly what I wanted to do. So huzzah for me! In celebration I leave you with this amusing picture that has nothing to do with BESM, or anything else I've talked about in this post.

Well Played Matthew, Well Played

A month has already passed since the end of my BESM campaign. I remain extremely satisfied with how the BESM campaign turned out, easily one of the best I’ve ever run under any role playing system. My players remained true to form, coming up with interesting and completely unexpected things to do right up until the end. I was particularly impressed with their decision to try and remove every soul in the Hell of Hungry Dragons before they sealed it up forever. Dan’s character was the driving force behind this little decision, apparently he felt infinite suffering for finite sins was terribly unfair, and he was able to convince Matt’s character that something needed to be done about this. For the record they succeeded (probably a testament to how ridiculously overpowered I let them become, and also to how as a GM I’ll allow almost everything that amuses me).

As (parenthetically) noted in my last post we got together on Saturday for BESM 3rd edition, which was also Matt’s first attempt at GMing. Matt has been talking about his multi-genre, anything goes, chaos campaign for as least as long as I ran my BESM campaign (quite probably longer). The general idea is any sort of humanoid character we could come up with (and build on 300 points) was basically fair game (there were a few restrictions, mainly don’t build a character whose abilities are completely derived from his social standing since he won’t be staying in his original world). Matt ended up with a Jedi (courtesy of Paul), an elven wizard (Dan’s contribution), and a steampunk tech genius (my character - heavily inspired by the Girl Genius webcomic). Interestingly Matt informed us that our characters had all died, and had us come up with the circumstances of their deaths.

The campaign opened with our characters waking up on a hill after being pulled away from their own worlds at the moment of what would have been their deaths. We don’t actually know who did this, or exactly for what reason. We’ve been told it was to save the universe, but the person who presumably did the summoning is currently in a vegetative state due to an accident during the complex magic ritual used to snatch our characters away from the jaws of death (or more precisely his soul had been sundered from his body and is currently lost). Just as we were getting a handle on our situation (we were on earth, but apparently the only humans in the world live in a village protected by a magic bubble that keeps the dinosaurs from coming to eat them), and hot on the trail of a clue to return the architect of our situation to consciousness, we suddenly found ourselves sucked into another alternate earth.

For me this is where the night was made (I suspect Paul probably harbors similar sentiments). We found ourselves in a convenience store staring face to face with a troll who was doing a little shopping. For numerous reasons that mostly have to do with shared gaming experience, and knowledge of the GM, I very quickly suspected (I imagine Paul did as well), and Matt soon confirmed that we were in a Stuffer Shack. If you’ve played Shadowrun, you almost certainly know what that is. Matt continued to delight by running us through Food Fight which is a classic Shadowrun introductory adventure (at least from 3rd Edition, and I think from 2nd as well, but I don’t know if it made the jump to 4th edition). After trouncing the thrill gang that was trying to rob the place we made good our escape, and Matt brought the evening to a close.

OMG!! ONOZ!!

WoW has made me a tool of the Devil!!

That is all. Come back in a few days for a real post. Possible topics for this post include the end of my BESM campaign (yes it really has ended), the inevitable "OVA" sequel campaign, my thoughts on Matt's "all genre-chaos campaign" (it's BESM Saturday!!!), my reaction to finally using BESM 3e (did I mention it's BESM Saturday!!!), Chipple hitting level 40 (I really need a picture of her on her horse), the anime I've been watching, and maybe even how I feel about my job these days (that last one is a pretty remote possibility).

Before I go I should mention the final Harry Potter (see below) book did not disappoint.